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The Politics of Adolescence

Teabaggers, via the WashTimes:
Waaah! The sheriff said some stuff which made us uncomfortable because it had a ring of truth to it! He needs to go!

Via.Following the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the Rep from Tucson, the sheriff for Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, remarked that blame for the shooting could possibly be traced back to political “vitriol”, and identified Arizona as “a mecca for prejudice and bigotry”.

In certain quarters, his remarks have caused lots of pearl clutching and poutrage with certain people now agitating for his removal from office.

The Sherrif is right, though – recently, Arizona attempted to put into place a law which would have resulted in racial profiling and an un-Constitutional preemption of the Federal government’s immigration enforcement, said law widely recognised as being aimed at targeting Mexican illegal immigrants; the Governor is the State, Jan Brewer, has lied and said that people crossing the border illegally (whether to work or commit crimes) have been murdering people by beheading; Brewer also signed law repealing legislation which granted domestic partners of state employees the ability to be considered as “dependants” for tax reasons; Brewer also hired lobbyists from Corrections Corporation of America as campaign advisors (CCA operates six private, for-profit prisons in the State); Arizona (in)famously boycotted Martin Luther King Day for many years; and Governor Brewer has also instituted some horrifically racist policies, which I won’t go into here, for fear of creating a paragraph that has its own postal district. Just see here and here for a few more examples.

Arizona has gone from being the Grand Canyon State to being the White Supremacy State, not that this is exactly new; in the American Civil War, the then Territory belonged to the Confederacy.

Given all of this history, it seems a little strange that the Teabaggers, notoriously prone to publicity failures as it is, should be protesting about these remarks; it’s pretty clearly established at this point that the politics of Arizona is fucked up and bigoted in a lot of ways. It seems a lot like the kind of hissyfits my teenage son throws when he doesn’t get exactly what he wants – this, and everything else the Tea Party does, simply reeks of adolescence. They don’t get what they want, so they throw a tantrum.